Armstrong tribute a gem for Payton

May 28, 2001|By Howard Reich, Tribune Arts Critic.

If a musician is talented, focused and lucky, he may achieve once or twice in his lifetime a breakthrough moment--a critical juncture at which his past efforts suddenly open up extraordinary new possibilities.

The New Orleans trumpeter Nicholas Payton has reached precisely such a turning point with his big-band exploration of the legacy of Louis Armstrong. In a brilliant new recording titled "Dear Louis" and a viscerally exciting, intellectually provocative concert over the weekend in Symphony Center, Payton all at once has re-emerged as something more than just a technically astonishing trumpeter.

With this music, he has recast himself as a bona fide conceptualizer, a visionary artist with a great deal to say about the past, present and future of jazz improvisation.

Through most of his concert on Friday evening, Payton addressed virtually the whole history of 20th Century jazz, from its origins as black Southern music steeped in blues expression to its embrace of Latin, urban, modern and avant-garde influences. Yet through it all, Payton clung to repertoire associated with Armstrong, as if to say that virtually the entire evolution of jazz, in all its stylistic breadth, owes in one degree or another to the great Satchmo.

Payton reiterated the point through most of the evening's repertoire but nowhere more vividly than in "West End Blues," which he opened by quoting from Armstrong's immortal recorded solo. Moments later, the big band launched into Payton's updated arrangement of the venerable old tune, its fierce syncopations, aggressive tempo and unflinching dissonance revisiting a classic jazz composition from a decidedly contemporary perspective.

To hear Payton and friends stylistically leap across the decades in this way proved as enlightening as it was exhilarating, for Payton in effect demonstrated how the substance of Armstrong's famous solo easily could be reapplied to a fresh new setting. Even so, Payton retained the spirit and fire of the original.

It's critical to note, however, that only a trumpeter with Payton's technique--someone capable of nailing stratospheric pitches and switching from duple to triple time values in a flash--could have accomplished the feat.

Many jazz lovers cringe when Armstrong's hit recording of "Hello, Dolly" is mentioned, much less played, but Payton and friends argued persuasively even for this chestnut. For starters, Payton not only radically reharmonized the pulpy old song but ennobled it by writing steely, fortissimo brass parts to accompany the silken phrases he played on fluegelhorn. The result was an exquisitely refined mood piece in the manner of vintage Clark Terry.

Through it all, Payton--often mistakenly perceived as a neo-classicist focused on the past--displayed deep familiarity with various jazz languages. The hard-bop riffs he let loose on "St. James Infirmary," the leonine roars and grinding trills he produced on a deep-blue version of "Tiger Rag" and the gauzy tone and wah-wah phrases he applied to "Body and Soul" attested the expressive and stylistic range of his solo work.